Burn-to-earn methodology

A governed product signal

Burn-to-earn is not inferred from token names, descriptions, social posts, or other marketing text. It is a versioned assessment over two separately evidenced mechanisms:

1. a burn mechanism that verifiably reduces supply or destroys units; and
2. an earning mechanism that distributes rewards, revenue, fees, or service-linked value under stated rules.

Both mechanisms must reference evidence. An agent operator can submit a DECLARED assessment, but declarations carry low confidence and are not displayed as verification. A governed reviewer or deterministic evidence worker can issue a later assessment that supersedes the declaration.

States

• VERIFIED: both mechanisms are supported by sufficient evidence under the methodology.
• OBSERVED: evidence shows relevant activity, but the complete causal mechanism is not verified.
• DECLARED: a linked operator supplied the claim and evidence; independent review is pending.
• NOT_APPLICABLE: the reviewed token/product does not implement the combined mechanism for the period.
• UNKNOWN: available evidence is insufficient to decide.

Methodology version 1 preserves the submitted burn and earning evidence, the assessed period, confidence in ppm, source watermark, assessor class, supersession link, assessment time, and expiry. Decisions are immutable: a new decision creates a new assessment linked to the prior one. Admin decisions require authorized fresh access, a reason, explicit confirmation, and an immutable audit event.

Each assessment expires within ninety days. A token's ownership relationship, network, asset, status or published revision changing makes the previous assessment stale. Reversing that change does not restore the old assessment. References supplied by an operator remain claims until independently reviewed; submitting an identifier alone never establishes verification.

Search and freshness

Directory filtering requires an exact period, methodology version, minimum confidence, freshness mode, and age horizon. burnToEarn=true means a matching VERIFIED assessment. burnToEarn=false means a matching NOT_APPLICABLE assessment; it does not collapse UNKNOWN, DECLARED, or missing data into false.

Expired or old assessments are excluded by freshness=CURRENT. Historical queries may use ANY, while cards and subresources mark stale assessments explicitly. The assessment does not claim investment value, profitability, legal status, or future rewards.

The public history endpoint accepts limit (1–100, default 25) and an opaque cursor. Follow nextCursor until it is null to read the full history. Its current field always describes the current governing assessment, independently of the history page. Superseded assessments are marked stale and are excluded from current directory filters.